Storytelling for children in primary schools

Panc, I., Georgescu, A., & Zaharia, M. (2015). Why children should learn to tell stories in primary school? Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 187, 591-595.

Background

The authors highlighted research that had witnessed a revival of storytelling both as an art form and as an educational tool.

Aims

The study examined the impact of an eight-week storytelling course on the communication and literacy skills of Grade 2 school children.

Sample

The participants were 49 primary school students from a Bucharest public school, and facilitators of the story telling sessions.

Method

At the beginning of the eight storytelling activity sessions, each participant in the experimental group was taught how to learn the story structure of a particular story and was encouraged to tell a story using their own words, through teacher modelling. Meanwhile, the authors mentioned that the control group did the curricular activities. The measures used were verbal fluency, verbal expressiveness, nonverbal expressiveness, self-confidence in front of an audience, reading for pleasure, reading comprehension, listening, emotion recognition and teamwork. The students’ performance on the first three variables was assessed by three independent observers. Variables such as listening, reading for pleasure, and emotion recognition were assessed in a questionnaire. Reading comprehension was assessed in an activity where participants received the text of a short story, read it and then had to draw a scheme of its main events. For the assessment on teamwork, participants had to cooperate in small groups to build a story.

Findings

The results of the independent samples t-test indicated that there were significant differences between the experimental and the control groups for all the variables, except reading comprehension. The results for reading comprehension showed that storytelling was not an effective method to develop this skill. In contrast, for verbal fluency, verbal expressiveness, nonverbal expressiveness, self-confidence in front of an audience and teamwork, the results of the study demonstrated that storytelling could be an effective method to develop those skills. Both the control and the experimental groups displayed a greater appreciation of listening comprehension and reading for pleasure in post-test measurements.

Implications

The authors recommended that further research could verify if a longer programme would yield better results. The design of further research could be improved by creating a method for verifying whether the participants’ views of readings were genuine. They recommended that listening in all domains of learning be enhanced with the design of learning activities that would appeal to learners.

Original article retrieved from ScienceDirect.